The exuberant Hindemith piece opening this program has a curious doubleness: It exemplifies Gebrauchsmusik (functional music for amateurs), which Hindemith championed to make music more accessible to a wider public, yet it is treacherous to perform, even for the most polished professional ensemble. Some regard it as a jokey send-up of German military band music, especially its opening fanfare and final march, but it is an innovative work that took symphonic wind and brass music to a new level. Hindemith wrote it because he felt the wind-brass idiom was not taken seriously, as he believed it deserved to be. In 1926, he and his colleagues in the Donaueschingen Festival (for which he served as an administrator) programmed it in an experimental concert of new works for military bands of the Weimar Republic. Hermann Scherchen, to whom Hindemith dedicated the piece, conducted the performance.
Hindemith wrote the piece in a few days (which was not unusual for him), yet it is an intricate, inventive composition with a variety of musical forms. Throughout, he exploits novel colors for brass and winds, presented with complex counterpoint and organized with his usual rigorous Neoclassical structures. Hindemith uses tonal language but with plenty of crunch and spicy harmonies, yet the overall sonority is surprisingly seductive since it is written for a German military band, which uses more “mellow” brass and fewer woodwinds (flugelhorns and tenor horns replace saxophones, for example) than the conventional concert band.
The work opens with a “Konzertante Ouvertüre” that blasts out a formidable fanfare, followed by a broad melody displaying Hindemith’s distinct brand of lyricism. This alternation of brash motifs and catchy melodies continues through much of the piece. Following a return of the original themes in the overture, a joyful march leads to six variations on the German folk tune “Prinz Eugen, der edle Ritter” (“Prince Eugene, the Noble Knight”); these are mainly perky and lively, full of bustling counterpoint—especially the sixth, a transparently scored fugato—but there are also somber moments, including an eloquent funeral dirge. The finale is a march with a whimsical middle section and an exciting buildup that leads to a triumphant conclusion.
In 1946, Richard Strauss wrote to his grandson that he had “put together an orchestral fantasia from the best parts of Die Frau ohne Schatten.” Culling the “best parts” was a challenge, given that the opera from 1917 lasts more than four hours and is one of Strauss’s most complex works, a combination of ethereal fairytale and blunt realism that bewildered audiences who were used to the enchantment of Der Rosenkavalier and Ariadne auf Naxos or the salacious frissons of Salome and Elektra. The libretto by his longtime collaborator Hugo von Hofmannsthal is a dense skein of allegory and archetypes that operates not only on earth, but in a spirit world and a kind of twilight-zone, in-between reality; the characters include an emperor, a nurse, an immortal empress in search of a shadow (a stand-in for a soul), and a textile dyer and his wife who squabble over issues of love and fertility. The Symphonic Fantasy, like the Suite from Der Rosenkavalier, works seamlessly as concert music, but it presents music that is refreshingly new to many listeners, since Die Frau ohne Schatten is infrequently performed.
Unlike the 12-tone and expressionist experiments that mark so much early 20th-century music (represented in this program by Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra), Strauss’s unapologetically tonal music was considered—at least by his detractors—to be deeply reactionary, even though his late–19th-century tone poems were deemed highly innovative when they first appeared. The Symphonic Fantasy from Die Frau ohne Schatten illustrates his extravagantly lush style, even though the orchestra is a pared-down version of the huge ensemble in the original opera. Like many of Strauss’s best works, it combines delicacy with grandeur, subtle chamber ensembles with majestic tutti.
The piece opens with a gruff descending motif for timpani and low winds depicting Keikobad, the Empress’s divine father, followed by a lyrical melodic section instantly recognizable as Strauss. The inviting world that the dyer’s wife could have if she sold her shadow to the Empress features swirling harp glissandos, scintillating winds, and velvet strings. In the opera’s duet between the dyer and his wife, the former is represented by an eloquent trombone solo, an example of Strauss’s impeccable scoring. The work culminates in a sonorous climax for all the forces before finally winding down to a serene, long-held chord recalling the conclusion to Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration.
Frantic yet serene, brutal yet delicate, revolutionary in harmony yet rigorously classical in structure, the Variations for Orchestra is Arnold Schoenberg’s first orchestral work to employ the 12-tone method that he created to impose a mathematically controlled order on his work after writing freely atonal, wildly creative pieces such as Erwartung, Pierrot lunaire, and the Five Pieces for Orchestra. For Schoenberg, serial composition represented the “emancipation of dissonance,” but in a traditional context—in this case, variation form and Bachian counterpoint. He did not see 12-tone music as revolutionary, but as a continuation and broadening of the German tradition. Never one for modesty, he declared that his new dodecaphonic method would “ensure the dominance of German music for the next 100 years.”
Schoenberg famously quipped that “my music is not modern; it is merely badly played.” The most dramatic example was surely the catastrophic premiere of the Variations for Orchestra in 1928, with Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting the Berliner Philharmoniker. Furtwängler respected Schoenberg, defended the 12-tone system, and encouraged Schoenberg to complete the Variations when the composer experienced writer’s block—but he disputed the claim that serialism was a continuation of the German tradition, calling Schoenberg’s new system “the first completely unhistorical step, the first real break with history.”
There were only three rehearsals, and they were disastrous—the Berlin players hated the piece, openly ridiculing it and declaring it unplayable; they cheered when Furtwängler announced the “wonderful news from Vienna: the composer is not coming.” Anton Webern, Schoenberg’s pupil, did come, writing to his mentor that the performance was “Unbelievable! Utterly irresponsible!” A small band of Schoenberg supporters clapped loudly, but most either booed or were coldly indifferent. The critics, not surprisingly, panned the work as “soulless” and “grotesque.” A later performance in Frankfurt under Hans Rosbaud was a success, however, and since then, the Variations have been championed by numerous prominent conductors, including Pierre Boulez, Herbert von Karajan, Ernő Dohnányi, Daniel Barenboim, Sir Simon Rattle, and Zubin Mehta.
Throughout the work, wispy chamber ensembles are set against crashing tutti. In the atmospheric opening, woodwinds flutter from a musical fog, and the music rises to a brief climax; the haunting theme then emerges with the cellos—one that is surprisingly easy to follow. “In a word, the theme must be relatively simple,” said Schoenberg in a radio broadcast following the 1931 performance, “for several reasons; one is that the variations gradually become more and more complex.”
The increasing complexity is certainly daunting, but the nine variations are also remarkably concise, usually lasting a minute or two, and are full of variety and shifting colors. Some are anxious and frantic (1, 3, 5, and especially 8), others serene and poetic (2, 6, 7, and especially 4, an elegant waltz with shimmering percussion). The final variation is gloomy and sinister, leading to a complex polyphonic finale that develops the so-called B-A-C-H motif, which is briefly suggested in the opening movement and some of the variations—a subtle reminder that Schoenberg considered himself as representing a continuation of the Austro-German tradition rather than a break from it. Indeed, Schoenberg called the finale an homage to J. S. Bach. As this extensive last section finally calms down into a wispy reminiscence of the main theme, Schoenberg seems to be moving toward a gentle ending, but a violent coda suddenly crashes in, the final jolt in a work full of surprises.
The evolution of Ravel’s La valse provides a fascinating instance of life overtaking and reshaping art. As early as 1907, Ravel was haunted by the idea of creating a gigantic apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, a work to be called “Vienna” that would glorify the waltzes of Schubert and the Strauss family. But by the time he got around to composing the piece—at the behest of Sergei Diaghilev, who had already produced his Daphnis et Chloé—the culture he wished to celebrate was collapsing into the abyss of World War I. La valse became not simple glorification but, in Ravel’s words, the depiction of a “fantastic and fatefully inescapable whirlpool.” Glitter and opulence are part of the scenario, but so is “the impression of a fantastic whirl of destiny.”
“My teacher was Edgar Allan Poe,” Ravel once said, and this work is suggestive of Poe’s “Ms. Found in a Bottle” and “A Descent into the Maelstrom.” Poe was a master at evoking mysterious atmospheres and crumbling worlds, and Ravel was influenced by both his works and his theories, especially the idea that a work of art should present a single intense mood concisely. La valse also resembles the music of Alban Berg (especially in Lulu) and the early films of Alfred Hitchcock (also a Poe admirer), in that it uses the Viennese waltz to depict a world poised on the brink of destruction—a decadent bubble about to burst.
As such, the work was a disappointment to Diaghilev, who refused to choreograph it, causing a rift that never healed. La valse was premiered as a poème chorégraphique by the Orchestre Lamoureux in 1920 and remained that way until 1929, when Bronislava Nijinska choreographed it for the Opéra national de Paris. Today, La valse is heard mostly in the concert hall, like so many other Diaghilev commissions, including Le sacre du printemps.
Unlike the ghostly fade-out of Valses nobles et sentimentales—Ravel’s other Viennese homage—the dynamic scheme of La valse consists of a long, shattering crescendo. This hallucinatory music, gradually building from a single motif, is like a Viennese waltz heard in a dream—one that gradually becomes a nightmare. According to the scenic directive appearing with the score: “Clouds whirl about. Occasionally, they part to allow a glimpse of waltzing couples. As they gradually lift, one can discern a gigantic hall, filled by a crowd of dancers in motion. The stage gradually brightens. The glow of the chandeliers breaks out fortissimo.”
As this directive suggests, La valse is one of Ravel’s most colorful scores. After the sonic blast at the end, which rips the piece apart, we are left with the sense that it is also his most disturbing.
—Jack Sullivan